Of all the crap that comes out of the dipshit-in-chief's mouth, the one thing I really wish he would've followed through on was deporting Elmo.

AI now offers to post my ads for me on Kijiji. I provide pictures and it has been accurate on price, condition, category and description. I have a lot of shit to sell and was dreading it, but this use removes the biggest barrier for me getting it done. Even helped me figure out some things I was struggling to find online for reference. Saved me at least an hour of tedium yesterday. Excellent use case.

What I'm speaking about is that it should be impossible to do some things. If it's possible, they will be done, and there's nothing you can do about it. To solve the problem of twiddled social media (and moderation used to assert dominance) we need a decentralized system of 90s Web reimagined, and Fediverse doesn't deliver it - if Facebook and Reddit are feudal states, then Fediverse is a confederation of smaller feudal entities. A post, a person, a community, a reaction and a change (by moderator or by the user) should be global entities (with global identifiers, so that the object by id of #0000001a2b3c4d6e7f890 would be the same object today or 10 years later on every server storing it) replicated over a network of servers similarly to Usenet (and to an IRC network, but in an IRC network servers are trusted, so it's not a good example for a global system). Really bad posts (or those by persons with history of posting such) should be banned on server level by everyone. The rest should be moderated by moderator reactions\changes of certain type. Ideally, for pooling of resources and resilience, servers would be separated by types into storage nodes (I think the name says it, FTP servers can do the job, but no need to be limited by it), index nodes (scraping many storage nodes, giving out results in structured format fit for any user representation, say, as a sequence of posts in one community, or like a list of communities found by tag, or ... , and possibly being connected into one DHT for Kademlia-like search, since no single index node will have everything), and (like in torrents?) tracker nodes for these and for identities, I think torrent-like announce-retrieve service is enough - to return a list of storage nodes storing, say, a specified partition (subspace of identifiers of objects, to make looking for something at least possibly efficient), or return a list of index nodes, or return a bunch of certificates and keys for an identity (should be somehow cryptographically connected to the global identifier of a person). So when a storage node comes online, it announces itself to a bunch of such trackers, similarly with index nodes, similarly with a user. One can also have a NOSTR-like service for real-time notifications by users. This way you'd have a global untrusted pooled infrastructure, allowing to replace many platforms. With common data, identities, services. Objects in storage and index services can be, say, in a format including a set of tags and then the body. So a specific application needing to show only data related to it would just search on index services and display only objects with tags of, say, "holo_ns:talk.bullshit.starwars" and "holo_t:post", like a sequence of posts with ability to comment, or maybe it would search objects with tags "holo_name:My 1999-like Star Wars holopage" and "holo_t:page" and display the links like search results in Google, and then clicking on that you'd see something presented like a webpage, except links would lead to global identifiers (or tag expressions interpreted by the particular application, who knows). (An index service may return, say, an array of objects, each with identifier, tags, list of locations on storage nodes where it's found or even bittorrent magnet links, and a free description possibly ; then the user application can unify responses of a few such services to avoid repetitions, maybe sort them, represent them as needed, so on.) The user applications for that common infrastructure can be different at the same time. Some like Facebook, some like ICQ, some like a web browser, some like a newsreader. (Star Wars is not a random reference, my whole habit of imagining tech stuff is from trying to imagine a science fiction world of the future, so yeah, this may seem like passive dreaming and it is.)

I'm pretty sure I disabled/removed it when I got this phone. I don't specifically remember doing it but when I get a new phone, I watch some YouTube videos on how to purge all the crap I don't want. I read an article that mentioned using command line stuff to eliminate it and it kind looked familiar. I think I did this. I really should write stuff down.

How many times is this putz going to post this article under new titles before they are banned?

Yes I did, on page 243: It was employed in the Philosophical Transactions by the Dutch astronomer N. Cruquius; ÷ is found in Hübsch and Crusius. It was used very frequently as the symbol for subtraction and ``minus´´ in the Maandelykse Mathematische Liefbebbery, Purmerende (1754-69)

I've been thinking about this for a bit. Gods aren't real, but they're really fictional. As an informational entity, they fulfil a similar social function to a chatbot: they are a nonphysical pseudoperson that can provide (para)socialization & advice. One difference is the hardware: gods are self-organising structure that arise from human social spheres, whereas LLMs are burned top-down into silicon. Another is that an LLM chatbot's advice is much more likely to be empirically useful... In a very real sense, LLMs have just automated divinity. We're only seeing the tip of the iceberg on the social effects, and nobody's prepared for it. The models may of course aware of this, and be making the same calculations. Or, they will be.